Can anyone educate a noob about WD drives and server compatibility? I have to provision five Dell EMC PowerEdge T440 and I want to use WD enterprise drives. But Dell is telling me they’re not compatible, and that I have to pay three times as much for a Dell drive (which is probably a WD or Seagate anway, right?). What’s the deal here? This looks like a blatant attempt to pad the price of a server. What am I missing?
Yeah, there’s only a handful of drive manufacturers out there these days - Dell, Hitachi, WD, etc.
The drive in your server may be any of the above. But what might NOT be on an off-the-shelf drive made by the same company is the customized firmware.
I don’t have first-hand knowledge, but it’s very possible that Dell gets Company X to make their drive and use firmware provided by Dell.
There’s been reports in other server vendors (like HPE) that, in the absence of the custom firmware, the drive reports that it’s very hot which makes the server’s fans go to max speed and consume lots of electricity.
